Hyper-V Consulting - Windows 2008 Server Virtualization Experts

• Server Consolidation
  Businesses are under pressure to ease management and reduce costs while retaining and enhancing competitive advantages, such as flexibility, reliability, scalability, and security. The fundamental use of virtualization to help consolidate many servers on a single system while maintaining isolation helps address these demands. One of the main benefits of server consolidation is a lower total cost of ownership (TCO), not just from lowering hardware requirements but also from lower power, cooling, and management costs.

  Businesses also benefit from server virtualization through infrastructure optimization, both from an asset utilization standpoint as well as the ability to balance workloads across different resources. Improved flexibility of the overall environment and the ability to freely integrate 32-bit and 64-bit workloads in the same environment is another benefit.

• Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
  Business continuity is the ability to minimize both scheduled and unscheduled downtime. That includes time lost to routine functions, such as maintenance and backup, as well as unanticipated outages. Hyper-V includes powerful business continuity features, such as live backup and quick migration, enabling businesses to meet stringent uptime and response metrics.

  Disaster recovery is a key component of business continuity. Natural disasters, malicious attacks, and even simple configuration problems like software conflicts can cripple services and applications until administrators resolve the problems and restore any backed up data. Leveraging the clustering capabilities of Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V now provides support for disaster recovery (DR) within IT environments and across data centers, using geographically dispersed clustering capabilities. Rapid and reliable disaster and business recovery helps ensure minimal data loss and powerful remote management capabilities.

• Testing and Development
  Testing and development are frequently the first business functions to take advantage of virtualization technology. Using virtual machines, development staffs can create and test a wide variety of scenarios in a safe, self-contained environment that accurately approximates the operation of physical servers and clients. Hyper-V maximizes utilization of test hardware which can help reduce costs, improve life cycle management, and improve test coverage. With extensive guest OS support and checkpoint features, Hyper-V provides a great platform for your test and development environments.
  
  
• Dynamic Data Center
  Hyper-V, together with your existing system management solutions, such as Microsoft System Center, can help you realize the dynamic data center vision of providing self-managing dynamic systems and operational agility. With features like automated virtual machine reconfiguration, flexible resource control, and quick migration, you can create a dynamic IT environment that uses virtualization to not only respond to problems, but also to anticipate increased demands.

• New and Improved Architecture. New 64-bit micro-kernelized hypervisor architecture enables Hyper-V to provide a broad array of device support methods and improved performance and security.
• Broad OS Support. Broad support for simultaneously running different types of operating systems, including 32-bit and 64-bit systems across different server platforms, such as Windows, Linux, and others.
• Symmetric Multiprocessors (SMP) Support. Ability to support up to four multiple processors in a virtual machine environment enables you to take full advantage of multi-threaded applications in a virtual machine.
• Network Load Balancing. Hyper-V includes new virtual switch capabilities. This means virtual machines can be easily configured to run with Windows Network Load Balancing (NLB) Service to balance load across virtual machines on different servers.
• New Hardware Sharing Architecture. With the new virtual service provider/virtual service client (VSP/VSC) architecture, Hyper-V provides improved access and utilization of core resources, such as disk, networking, and video.
• Quick Migration. Hyper-V enables you to rapidly migrate a running virtual machine from one physical host system to another with minimal downtime, leveraging familiar high-availability capabilities of Windows Server and System Center management tools.
• Virtual Machine Snapshot. Hyper-V provides the ability to take snapshots of a running virtual machine so you can easily revert to a previous state, and improve the overall backup and recoverability solution.
• Scalability. With support for multiple processors and cores at the host level and improved memory access within virtual machines, you can now vertically scale your virtualization environment to support a large number of virtual machines within a given host and continue to leverage quick migration for scalability across multiple hosts.
• Extensible. Standards-based Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) interfaces and APIs in Hyper-V enable independent software vendors and developers to quickly build custom tools, utilities, and enhancements for the virtualization platform.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager is the toolset used by MCC's server virtualization consultants to manage the virtualized data center. Virtual Machine Manager enables increased physical server utilization, centralized management of virtual machine infrastructure and rapid provisioning of new virtual machines

Windows Server 2008 server virtualization using Hyper-V technology has been an integral part of the operating system. Windows Server 2008 R2 introduces a new version of Hyper-V. Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 includes three core areas of improvement for creating dynamic virtual data centers:

One of the most important aspects of any data center is providing the highest possible availability for systems and applications. Virtual data centers are no exception to the need for consolidation, high availability and most of all sophisticated management tools. Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 includes the much-anticipated Live Migration feature, which allows you to move a virtual machine between two virtualization host servers without any interruption of service. The users connected to the virtual machine being moved might notice only a slight slowing in performance for a few moments. Otherwise, they will be unaware that the virtual machine was moved from one physical computer to another.

• Live Migration Support through Cluster Shared Volumes
  Live Migration uses the new Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) feature within Failover Clustering in Windows Server 2008 R2. The CSV volumes enable multiple nodes in the same failover cluster to concurrently access the same Logical Unit Number (LUN). From a VM’s perspective, each VM appears to actually own a LUN; however, the .vhd files for each VM are stored on the same CSV volume.
   
• Improved Cluster Node Connectivity Fault Tolerance
  Because of the architecture of CSV, there is improved cluster node connectivity fault tolerance that directly affects VMs running on the cluster. The CSV architecture implements a mechanism, known as dynamic I/O redirection, where I/O can be rerouted within the failover cluster based on connection availability.
   
• Enhanced Cluster Validation Tool
  Windows Server 2008 R2 includes a Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) for all major server roles, including Failover Clustering. This analyzer examines the best practices configuration settings for a cluster and cluster nodes.

With DPM 2010,  highly available virtual machines (VM) deployed on Windows Server 2008 R2 using Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) clusters are protected in addition to standalone Hyper-V servers and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V clusters. For all above mentioned server configurations, DPM 2010 supports:

• Seamless protection of Live Migrating VMs (For Windows Server 2008 R2): DPM 2010 is Live Migration aware and seamlessly protects a VM after it migrates to another node of the Hyper-V R2 cluster to another without manual intervention.
• Item Level Recovery from host level backup: DPM 2010 supports item level recovery (ILR) which allows you to do granular recovery of files and folders, volumes and virtual hard disks (VHD) from a host level backup of Hyper-V VMs to a network share or a volume on a DPM protected server.
• Original Location Recovery: DPM 2010 supports online recovery of the protected VM to the original location.
• Alternate Host Recovery: DPM 2010 supports alternate location recovery (ALR) which allows you to recover a Hyper-V VM to an alternate stand-alone or clustered Hyper-V host.